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Chatroulette

Chatroulette is an online chat website that pairs strangers from around the world together for webcam-based conversations. Visitors to the website begin an online chat (text, audio, and video) with another visitor who is chosen at random. At any point, either user may leave the current chat by initiating another random connection.

The Chatroulette web site was created by Andrey Ternovsky, a 17-year-old high school student in Moscow, Russia. Ternovsky says the concept arose from video chats he used to have with friends on Skype, and that he wrote the first version of Chatroulette in "two days and two nights". Ternovsky chose the name "Chatroulette" after watching The Deer Hunter, a 1978 film set in the Vietnam War in which prisoners of war are forced to play Russian roulette.

In early November 2009, shortly after the site launched, it had 500 visitors per day. One month later there were 50,000. The site has been featured in The New York Times, The New Yorker, New York magazine, and on...

51 Recent Stories

Mariah Carey's "All I Want For Christmas Is You" symbolizes the beauty of the holiday season in perfect harmony. Everyone loves this song; the naysayers are simply grinches. YouTuber and comedian Steve Kardynal put the song to good use by pranking Ch...

Chatroulette at your own risk: Steve Kardynal is on the loose. The popular YouTube star known for his outrageous Chatroulette stunts -- last year, he donned a skimpy bikini and sang "Call Me Maybe" -- takes on the queen of outrageous herself, Miley C...

Chatroulette just got a much cuter -- and safer for work -- spin-off. The similarly named "Catroulette" is a cat adoption website that bases its user interface on Chatroulette's nexting model. The website allows you to skip through videos of adorable...

Just when you thought the randomized video chat craze was long gone, Sean Parker has stepped up to show you what you're missing. Parker and partner Shawn Fanning founded Airtime, a platform which promises a simple and personalized video chat experien...

"What if someone just has a really phallic-looking face?" This is the question I found myself asking Airtime founder Sean Parker, a man who coincidentally turned out to be my very first Airtime chatmate. Airtime is a platform that makes it dead-simpl...

The verdict is in on Sean Parker's new random video chat startup Airtime: It's ChatRoulette, albeit with Facebook connectivity and a slightly greater chance of running into celebrities. That much was driven home Tuesday, when a New York artist who st...

Earlier today, while YouTube was briefing the press on YouTube Remote for Android and YouTube Topics at its headquarters in Silicon Valley, the company welcomed a special guest through its doors: Merton of Chatroulette fame. Merton is the mysterious ...

For this week's YouTube Roundup, we've let viral star Merton the Chatroulette Piano Guy call the shots when it comes to theme selection. This week's through-line of choice? Improvisation, of course. While I'm sure you've all enjoyed these weekly YouT...

A mystery man known only as Merton burst onto the scene about six months ago, garnering acclaim and attention for creating improvised songs on his piano by surfing Chatroulette. In addition to the viral buzz, Merton also attracted the public's intere...

If Chatroulette, Omegle and Tinychat don't satisfy your hankering for trolling, do we have a toy for you: Rumpetroll, a Norwegian chat site that lets you swim around in a black morass in the guise of a tadpole. The concept is pretty simple. Just clic...

Chatroulette might be all about depicting a random array of topography (if you know what I mean), but a new hack called Globe Genie gives you a peek at a whole new kind of peak: random views from around the world, via Google Street View. Globe Genie ...

This post is part of Mashable’s Spark of Genius series, which highlights a unique feature of startups. The series is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark.. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here. N...

We hope you had a great weekend and that you have an even better work week. To help you get into the swing of things, we've assembled 16 helpful or entertaining stories from Saturday and Sunday to help you start your Monday on a strong information fo...

Chatroulette, the random video chat website that became a minor pop culture phenomenon, has been shut down. The site now hosts a message saying "experiment #1 is over" and that a "renewed and updated version" will launch tomorrow. But what will chang...

Among all of the weird characters you can encounter on popular random video chat service Chatroulette, pretty girls are a breath of fresh air, right? Well, it depends: for users who've stumbled upon the viral video campaign from Lionsgate, promoting ...

We've already brought you one round-up of social songs, a great selection of Facebook songs and some Twitter ditties, but now we're back with more topical tunes. Within this new list you'll find spoofs, parodies, comical raps and even some earnest lo...

Do you love getting e-mail? Do you love getting e-mail from random people? Are you an inherently lonely fellow/female? Well, there's a service out there for everyone, and your service of choice is undoubtedly Invisible Note. In the grand tradition of...

If you were ready to write off Chatroulette as just a passing Internet fad, don't. Sean Parker, the man who founded Napster and helped shape Facebook's early years as founding president, has revealed that he is now working with Chatroulette and sees ...

Chatroulette is finally adding some new features to its ultra-simple video chat format. Two new theme-specific areas are now on offer: Localroulette automatically routes users to specific location-based channels according to IP address, and Channelro...

There's a new Chatroulette clone on the block. It's called iChatr, but it's different from all the others; it's an app for the iPhone 4's front-facing FaceTime camera. The free app is already out in the Apple App Store , and we've got to admit that t...

Fad or no fad, Chatroulette's 15 minutes of fame isn't up just yet. An art gallery is showing "a tableau of human reactions" gleaned from the viral video chat site; the exhibit is called the Narcissus Series. According to the gallery's curators, "The...

There's been a lot of discussion of late about whether Chatroulette is on its way out -- our own Ben Parr wondered whether the random video chat service would retain its popularity if it were censored (apparently traffic has been on the decline latel...

Chatroulette has been on the rise since earlier this year, when it suddenly became an international phenomenon. It has been the source of numerous viral videos, but it's also been the source of voyeuristic male masturbators. Currently the company is ...

Although 14% of the service's users are categorized as "perverts,", Chatroulette is turning out to be a font of creative inspiration. From Merton and Ben Folds to would-be Lady Gagas, Travelocity gnomes and medieval parodies, there's no shortage of u...

Some would say that the seamy video-chat site Chatroulette takes us back to the Internet Dark Ages. Well, one denizen of creative website community YTMND developed that sentiment quite literally with the creation of Medieval Chat Roulette. The site i...

Chatroulette has been giving journalists reporting fodder for slow news days for a few months now -- enough time, apparently, to spawn a number of clones. In your opinion, do any of these clones do Chatroulette better than the original? What would yo...

When Merton the Chatroulette Piano Guy burst on the scene last month, a considerable number of people believed him to be musician Ben Folds. Folds, in turn, started making like Merton at concerts, uploading his "Odes to Merton" to YouTube. Mashable r...

Ben Folds is back with another Merton-inspired video -- this one comprising footage from four live shows during which the indie icon busted out the Chatroulette. Merton the Chatroulette Piano Guy has become an Internet legend this past month, racking...

Chalk it up to April Fool's Day paranoia, but when we came across news that the official Travelocity gnome was using Chatroulette for business purposes we were a tad skeptical. The screenshots sent to us by Travelocity confirm that the gnome is lurki...

Five months ago, right around the time that Andrey Ternovskiy was building Chatroulette, no one could have predicted that being "nexted" would become the modern day equivalent to a rite of passage. But after three days of coding, Ternovskiy introduce...

Watch out cats and kittehs everywhere -- your spot atop the heap of most viral animals is about to be usurped by a whole legion of heroes on a half-shell. That's right -- for some reason that I have yet to ascertain (aside from the obvious, "I like t...

The Chatroulette piano improv guy is back -- and his lyrics are as good as ever. Merton, the pianist who wrote on-the-fly songs about people he saw on Chatroulette, has posted a second video today with even more great improv pieces. Will the Chatroul...

There's no denying that Chatroulette is currently a huge internet hit, brewing a new meme almost each day. Lady Gaga, on the other hand, recently became the biggest name on YouTube. Now, the inevitable clash of these two phenomena has finally happene...

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